


memento (vivere)

by seek_its_opposite



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s08e15 DeadAlive, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 08:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4780058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seek_its_opposite/pseuds/seek_its_opposite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe all Mulder children are fated to forget everything except the fact that they’ve forgotten. Deadalive AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	memento (vivere)

**Author's Note:**

> for the tumblr anon who wondered what would happen if Mulder actually meant it when he asked “who are you?” thanks to one-in5billion and a-brighter-yellow for guidance. comments welcome!

**i.**

She used to think that she knew the three most dangerous words in the English language.

_Who are you_

One word for every scar on his left cheek. She touches them before she can stop herself, runs her thumb along the face she buried. She can see him with a flashlight at his chin in an old Victorian manor on Christmas Eve, teasing her because a part of him can’t believe that this, of all places, is where she is afraid. He scares her senseless to get it out of her system, stops her heart and starts it again.  _He was a brooding but heroic young man_. Who are you

“Mulder, it’s me.”

One word for every scar on his right cheek. In the universe according to Mulder, it would be a kind of spell; it would cancel the “who are you” and bring him back.  _It’s about balance, Scully_ , she imagines him saying as he clicks his slide show projector and studies her from the edge of his desk. _The name “vodou” comes from a Western corruption of the French “vous deux,” meaning you two—or you, too, if you prefer. It’s the idea that everything we do in the universe is connected. Chinese philosophy has the yin and the yang. You know it through Isaac Newton: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction_. She would have agreed. She would not have told him. She’d have waited for the universe to prove him right. She had thought she was done waiting.

“Mulder, it’s Scully. Dana Scully. I’m your partner. Is any of this coming back to you?”

His lips part without a word and she still can’t see the sky in his eyes.  _Do not break._  She inhales so sharply that her breath shatters in her chest. She shoves the boulder up the hill.

“Do you remember anything?” She has never been so tired.

“A bright light,” he rasps through cracked lips, and she recalls her own bright white place. Unless—Samantha.

“You were taken. From Bellefleur, Oregon, Mulder.” ( _I believe you_.) “You were working a case. An X-File.” ( _I believe you were abducted by aliens_.) “You were looking for proof.

“You and I went to Bellefleur seven years ago on our first case.” ( _You were right, Mulder. I do believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. Agent Mulder, I’m Dana Scully. I’ve been assigned to work with you. I’m looking forward_ ) “I was assigned to work with you. I’m a medical doctor. I—”

_believe you._

“I’m your friend.”

The boulder isn’t moving and her palms are slick with tears. She opens his fingers and closes them again around sunflower seeds, wraps her hands around his like a prayer. She knows this blank face. She sees him in her nightmares sometimes with a gun aimed between her eyes—she sees him more often with the barrel pressed against his temple, too familiar with the trigger. If this gun goes off, it kills them both. But that’s true of any gun.

“Mulder, fight this.”

_Who are you, who are you, who are you_

The clock ticks. Nine minutes since he stopped time.  _God_ , she thinks,  _if there were any balance in the universe._

**ii.**

They won’t let her take him home. There are tests to be run, days of tests, and so many clean bills of health that she starts to resent them. He is a miracle in all the ways but one. The machines say Mulder is fine, but they’re wrong; the data can’t tell the whole truth. This is how he always felt, about everyone. This is what she always knew about him. Never give up on a miracle, he’d said once, their foreheads pressed together until they made a new horizon.

She tells him about all-day pickup games in the vineyard with Samantha and that time he recited a  _Twilight Zone_  monologue in his sleep, channeling Rod Serling in the passenger seat of a rental car as they sped through the heartlands. If he tries, he says, he’s pretty sure he can conjure up memories of a little curly-haired girl who followed him around. He could just be saying it to please her, but she remembers the words  _I think I had a brother_  loped in rounded teenage handwriting and believes him. Maybe all Mulder children are fated to forget everything except the fact that they’ve forgotten. The baby kicks.

Skinner and Doggett are watching her. Skinner puts his hand on her back to guide her into the hall. Doggett circles his palms around her arms and looks her in the eye. They tell her to go home. They tell her to get some rest. She’ll rest here, she says, and again, and again, “I’m fine.”

_I’m fine, Mulder._

They send Agent Reyes to bring her things from home.

He has not asked about the pregnancy. In that sense, at least, he’s still Mulder, dutifully suppressing his curiosity on personal matters and waiting for her to speak first. She looks away when he raises questioning eyebrows and changes the subject to baseball, the Bermuda Triangle, anything else.

 

**iii.**

She takes him outside one night to look at the sky. He can still name every constellation. He has no idea that each star is a soul, no idea that one of them is his.

 

**iv.**

Thirteen hours after he follows her down the hall to his own apartment, she calls from the road.

“Mulder, it’s m—it’s Scully. Get dressed. I want to take you somewhere.”

“It’s almost midnight.”

“Almost midnight is your favorite time of day.”

He meets her outside in a tight t-shirt and messy hair and she wonders if there is a version of either one of them capable of not trusting the other. Maybe they could crash together a million times and it would always end the same. But there is more than the ending to consider here, she rationalizes on the too-silent drive. She’s never needed to catch the lights on the horizon as much as she needs the two of them in this car in a different kind of silence.

The night guard in their wing of the Hoover Building has spent more time with Mulder than with her own family, so the fact that he hasn’t been reinstated isn’t an issue. Scully leads him down the stairs, past the cabinets that they used to crowd out the outside world until only Mulder and Scully could walk this hallway shoulder to shoulder. She feels like she should knock on the door. She unlocks it like it’s a bead on her rosary and steps back; this isn’t her threshold to cross.

It’s not exactly the same office that he left. There’s a new desk in the corner. But she’s put Mulder’s name plate back where it belongs and she needs to see him here anyway. He takes his time making the rounds, his stations of the cross: the projector, “her” area, the skylight. He flips through the files. He folds his arms and studies his poster, opens the top left drawer of the desk. He drops Queequeg’s tag almost as soon as he picks it up. She looks down to stop herself from smiling.

He runs the coins between his fingers, the ones she’s never been able to make sense of. They appeared one day like they’d always been there, and maybe they always had, a penny and a dime fused together like she and Mulder are— inexplicably but completely. He spins them like a top.

And then he’s on the desk and he’s reaching for the pencils in the ceiling, and as high as his shirt lifts, she still can’t see the scar she knows is there. He sticks a pencil between his teeth and hops down, tugs open the top right drawer, grabs the post-it notes, takes the pencil from his mouth. With his long fingers he spins it like a dance and he’s scrawling something, bouncing almost, tapping his left hand on the surface of the desk. He slaps the note on his poster, right on the UFO.

Scully steps into their space, squinting as she comes close enough to read.

“YOU ARE HERE”

She can’t feel anything but her pulse. “Mulder?”

He’s scribbling on more post-it notes now. He looks up, a galaxy in his eyes, matches her tone, and there he is. “Scully.” All smiles.

He pins another post-it on his name plate, strides across the office and post-its Doggett’s desk, strides again and slaps one on the door.

“You were right about the desks, Scully. There was room for another.” He points at the poster with a flourish. “But I was right about the aliens.”

“You were right,” she laughs. A tear hits her shoe.

He moves toward her, more focused on closing the gap between them than he’s ever been on any of their cases. She’d forgotten how quickly he covers ground. There’s one more note stuck to his finger. She takes it, presses it to her heart.  _You are here._

He touches her necklace, brushes the hair from her forehead, rubs a few strands between his fingers and wipes a tear from her cheek. She used to think the three most dangerous words were  _I love you_ , but there are ways to say it without using those words.

“I’m here,” Mulder whispers. He takes her face in his hands and kisses the years back. 


End file.
